Chayanovshchina

Chayanov's theory

Chayanov analysed the peasant household as a unit operating on a logic different from that of a capitalist enterprise. A family farm that hires no wage labour decides its labour input not by maximizing profit but at the balance between the family's consumption needs and the drudgery of work, and can therefore respond to falling prices in the opposite way to a firm. This was his labour-consumer balance.

Policy conclusions followed from the analysis. Rather than converting peasant farming into large enterprises, it was more efficient to integrate particular functions vertically through cooperatives: purchasing, sale, processing, and credit. He called this cooperative collectivization, and with his colleagues of the Organization-Production School he stood at the centre of Soviet agrarian research in the 1920s.

Making of the label

At the Conference of Marxist Agrarians in December 1929 Stalin publicly defined Chayanov's theories as an agency of imperialism. After that statement Chayanovshchina settled in as an official term of denunciation and the form of scholarly dispute disappeared. The charge was that his theory, by presupposing the stability of smallholding agriculture, denied class differentiation and defended the kulak.

The label was tied to the timing of full collectivization. So long as a gradual path through cooperatives existed in theory, the necessity of forced collectivization was weaker, so the policy turn required the removal of the alternative theory.

The case and restoration

In 1930 Chayanov and his colleagues were arrested in the so-called Labour Peasant Party case. No such organization existed, and the investigation was fabricated through confessions. Chayanov was exiled, imprisoned again, and shot in 1937; Kondratiev was shot in the same family of cases.

Chayanov's work was banned in the USSR for decades but was rediscovered abroad. His analysis of the peasant household became a standard reference in later twentieth-century development economics and peasant studies, and rehabilitation and republication followed in the USSR after 1987. It was in this period too that the peasant utopian novel he published in 1920 was read again as a document anticipating forced collectivization.